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Thread: Experienced Developer - Fusion newbie - concepts and direction questions

  1. #1
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    Default Experienced Developer - Fusion newbie - concepts and direction questions

    I'm an experienced developer but a NetObjects Fusion newbie. I have taken on work for a friend that presents me with an opportunity to learn something new working with NetObjects Fusion 12.0. I have spent a number of hours working through the NetObjects interface learning how to create pages. Admittedly I have not worked my way through the entire manual, but I am starting to think I might understand the framework model and how it could be used to duplicate the functionality below. What I'd like to do is confirm the inkling I have of the way to go before I spend significantly more time running down what may be a less-than-efficient approach or even a dead-end.

    The design pattern, were I implementing it in a framework I am familiar with would be something like this: The initial html page presents a text box on a form. The user inputs text and clicks the submit button to submit the form. An external program (java or php) is invoked which pulls the POST value submitted by the user and does a lookup on a table. The code/script then does its work manipulating data it creates based on values in the table. When done it places the value in a data object in memory and passes control to a template processor (java or php). The template processor reads an html template and substitutes values from the data object into the appropriate places in the html template and returns the completed html page to the user's browser. I have years of professional experience working with this approach and I understand it well. The following description is what I think I need to do to implement the same user experience within the Fusion model. I would appreciate it very much if someone would provide some confirmation or alternative approaches or point me in a better direction.

    Creating the html text input, submit button and form in Fusion is easy as is controlling the page flow to the Results Page. I managed to stumble my way into getting a FormHandler.php script to run when the submit button is clicked and I can see it contains the expected POST data (using Eclipse PDT on a Zend/Apache development box I set up). I will want to use the form handler script to do the lookup on the table and manipulate the data to create the elements I want to display on the Results Page. However, what I think I need to do is place these elements in another table so the Results Page can be set up with a Data Source object that will draw from this new table. Have I got this right? Is there a better way?

    Another question: Given that the "new table" will have rows from multiple users' sessions. What is the best way to limit the rows to the specific user? I know how I would do it in my usual framework, but I haven't been through the manual section that describes that yet. I would guess that the Data Source object on the Results Page is created with a filter based on a specific value associated with the user. However, I'm not sure how the Results Page knows about the user connected with it. In other words, what is the mechanism by which the Results Page can have a variable that will allow the DataSource object to apply a value as a filter?

    I appreciate any and all input. Thanks.

  2. #2
    Senior Member gotFusion's Avatar
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    What you are talking about is an external database and conditional processing. Most of this will be outside of what the Fusion product will be able to accomplish.

    You can insert any php/mysql coding within the Fusion GUI and generate pages that will display using the design/layout you have created but it is the underlying php/mysql coding that will do all of the grunt work (query and display of the data items).

    I have found that it is best to hand code all external dynamic content then call the module files into Fusion using a inserted included statement using this method: http://www.gotfusion.com/tutorials/t...emID=4068#body
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  3. #3
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    Thanks for your quick response. That's much as I figured. I'll want to use the include on the Results Page then. I'll play with that after I get further along with the database creation and the external script itself. I appreciate your help.

  4. #4
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    Default Successful Implementation

    That worked nicely. I was happy to find that NetObjects plays nicely with customized sections of the html when embedding short sections of php. I was also able to write my custom form handler and manage the presentation of the manipulated table data by using _SESSIONS on the pages saved with the php extension while maintaining the ability to fully use the standard Publish Full Site feature.

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